The Hermit Project is a participatory community performance project from artist Tessa Wills where, together, we make performances and practices in private as part of an arsenal of resilience. These times require multiple strategies and threads of action, leadership and fearlessness in the face of destruction and oppression.

The Hermit Project levers open and fiercely protects space in our lives for creative practice and retreats as an essential part of our arsenal for resilience and creative problem solving. The Hermit Project offers a format for practice and connection through non goal based creative practice as vicious political resistance.

The Hermit Project raises up quietude as part of your defense mechanism: strategic retreat, reformatted as resistance: resilience practice. Nourish and resource your creativity by honing your own creative practice. Immerse in aesthetics as a strategy.

Whether you have an established creative practice or you want to develop a regular creative retreat by yourself or with friends, The Hermit Project is a platform and framework to hold you, and connect you to community resources as you work. The hermit project does not replace direct action. We must resist in many ways, and we must discern which kind of resistance is essential for our individual activist paths. The Hermit Project holds that practiced creative action holds the answers that we are looking for, and that nourishment is critical to sustain our lives under this pressure. If you are called to nourish and resource your creativity, your personhood and interpersonal relationships, to tend to your resilience through daily practice, this small community subculture is an invite for a rich process. The Hermit Project challenges you to connect to your creativity regularly, and share it with others. Its an aesthetics of deep relationality: Resilience practices that connect people on a deep level. The Hermit Project is a hub for research and activities on individually defined paths.

You can join The Hermit Project by by practicing alone, or together, coming to a live participatory performance, checking out some of the Hermit Relics from Wills' work or of the Hermartist in residence. As soon as you post any relics (or traces) of your practice #thehermitproject, then you are a part of the community. You can choose your level of involvement in the community, and be a solitary Hermit, a Hermit House or a Hermit Heart. And you can always ask for some input from members of the community or Tessa.

“We are inclined to think of reflection as something quiet and personal. My argument here is that reflection is action-oriented, social and political. Its ‘product’ is praxis (informed, committed action), the most eloquent and socially significant form of human action.”

Stephen Kemmis, “Action Research and the Politics of Reflection”

“To create one’s own world takes courage.” Georgia O’Keeffe

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” - Audre Lorde